this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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A big ton of people left Reddit and ended up here.
A fuckton more people rolled over presenting their belly to Spez and stopped protesting and continued to use Reddit as if nothing had happened.
You forgot to mention reddit and spez basically took over and booted admins from subreddits to make them available again
afaik that's been the policy ever since. If the mods don't fully comply with all instructions, they are removed, and then because it's modless they get to put in new ones. Basically lackeyism at digital scale.
It needs to be understood that the culture before this happened was very different than it is now.
The mods basically owned their subreddits. Mods could do anything they wanted. You could ban someone for the color of their socks. You had full control of the CSS coding and functionality of your subreddit, so you could make it look like dogshit for the laughs and ban anyone who typed the letter L. Some subreddits got popular just for being weird like this. Whatever you wanted to do, it didn't matter. If you didn't like how a subreddit was ran you just made your own. If you made a subreddit then that was the corner of your internet to do whatever you wanted with. That was the tradeoff. You got a space in return for creating it. You didn't even need to moderate it.
After the mods got removed from their subreddits for protesting it became very clear that the subreddits were not theirs anymore. It was the first time reddit ever took actions against moderators for something that wasn't blatantly illegal.
Yep, when they started forcing subreddits to open after having gone dark, that was the final straw for me. It was clear reddit was saying "fuck you, we own the platform and you can't do shit about it."
At the end of the day it's the fundamental issue of allowing all infrastructure to be owned by any individual or small group of individuals
"Shareholders"
Well, you have to understand that what you write on redditor isn't owned by you, buy by reddit. And a lot of people didn't, so they got angry when they felt "their" stuff was taken over by reddit.
Stuff isn't really yours here on Lemmy either. Instance owner can't pay anymore, or simply isn't in the mood anymore, the close their server down, the stuff you posted there is gone, and you won't successfully sue anybody about it.
People tend to feel "grandfathered in" when they were in control of something for a while, but that can be misleading. Reddit was never a socialist paradise that they ran out of the good of their hearts.
Yeah, it was a palace coup as he had Schwartz indirectly eliminated.
What happened was a reminder that anyone calling themselves Redditors are literally serfs walking on spez private property and the bastard therefore can eject anyone.
And 99% returned to posting, belly-up, like nothing happened.
I noticed a significant shift in the conversation, I think a lot of people left
Reddit has somewhere north of 100 million MAU. Lemmy has somewhere in the realm of 50k MAU, or 0.05% of Reddit. Even factoring in PieFed, etc., we're talking about a drop in the bucket for Reddit.
A lot of people came to Lemmy, by Lemmy standards, but almost nobody left Reddit, by Reddit standards. The case can be made that our 0.05% are the the best 0.05% of Reddit, but it's still teeny tiny. 99.9% of users just bent over and shouted "Yes Spez!"
Edit: this article includes active user estimates each quarter, and the numbers continually seem to be going up.
Active users that post and comment matter much more than the total number though. Lemmy of course is much smaller, but it certainly has attracted a decent portion of reddit's "active" users
That article doesn't attempt to differentiate between human users and bots.
Also, Reddit has gotten significantly more ban-happy since then, which is almost certainly creating a chilling effect on discussions there.
It doesn't take a lot of that to cause a shift in conversations.
Even if 90% of Reddit's MAUs are bots, Lemmy would still be <1% of Reddit's human userbase.
They are getting paid on their active users for advertising and investors. I would guess the active humans involved is >1% of them.
It should be highlighted that while the amount of people who left Reddit for alternatives might not have made a dent to Reddit in the long-run, it really was what brought Lemmy from a small experiment of a few hundred users with a few dozen active posters, to the thousands it is today.
It wasn't just the user count that changed, a lot of earlier Lemmy bugs started getting attention due to the need to scale, many more apps and frontends started being developed at the time, the lemmy community is multipolar, so it's not dependent on just .world or .ml, and compatible but separate implementations like kbin and piefed were developed. These are all benefits to an open ecosystem that you could argue stemmed from that protest. You can forget about needing to fix Reddit now if you want, because with enough effort, Lemmy is an adequate replacement.
The infrastructure is there for sure. All we need is a little more scale; a bunch of communities that I would love to partake in more are so close to being self-sustainable once a few more posters pop up. I firmly believe it's going to happen soon, could be with the next big Reddit mistake really. But it does take one more push.
Got any names of those communities? If they're interesting, I could contribute
I’m one of them, only ever opened reddit when they had a relevant answer to an issue I was searching a solution for since then.
Same. I also think the people who came over were some of the best content creators. They know what you have to do make it lively. That's why trolls go after them.
Same. I do not feel guilty doing web search and having it feed me reddit answers without actually opening reddit.
It was Spez's open letter that made me leave. It was just dripping with "you need us, you'll be back." It seems he was right, for the most part, but he wasn't right about me, at least.
Fuck /u/spez.
Is Dessalines our spez?
No, if only because Big D can produce a functional and pleasant mobile app.
You're on a piefed instance, so theres some other guy, but he's also... controversial.
I don't think a lot of people went to lemmy, it was just talked about but there wasn't a massive "migration". I think I deleted my reddit account in protest or I didn't even have an account at the time and I went to use element instead.
I'm one of the people that deleted my Reddit accounts and went to Lemmy. One of them was over or at a hundred K, karma, and it's just gone, other than the fact that a couple of the stories I wrote were reposted by news sites.
Present, I think I had over 500k karma, but I don’t really care about that. I think I joined about ‘09
Same here.
Idk how much karma the account had, but I deleted a 13 year old account over that API fiasco and came here.
Hello, me 4. One time I even got the "Top 1% of karma earners" award which... well I didn't know how to feel about that. Deleted my account when the only mobile app that offered visual assists for visually impaired peeps was ruined by greed.
Me 5. Account over a decade old. Fuck Spez.
Me 6. Haven't logged into reddit once since then
Well then I'm one of the special few. 🤓
Beyond that, there were a bunch of people watching and posting upticking Lemmy usage stats. I recall it being tens of thousands (mainly joining Lemmy.world), but those who stuck around was much smaller. Unfortunately when I joined, the messaging around Lemmy & federation was poor and there were a lot of ghost-town communities.
There was definitely a massive migration, at least seen from lemmy's side, check out the graphs at Fediverse observer. Within a two month span (May-July 2023), the number of total monthly lemmy users went from 47 000 to 1 700 000. That's a 37-fold increase in two months. The number peaked at about 1.9 million in august the same year, with about 130 000 active monthly users (up from about 1 000). In the same period, the number of online lemmy servers went from 80 to a peak at 1396 (a 17-fold increase).
In reddit terms, the migration wasn't massive, they lost on the order of a hundred thousand users. Still, over a hundred thousand users leaving a platform within a couple months is probably near-unprecedented in internet history.
I think Reddit lost many of its most active users.
I still go back for a couple of subreddits like Unraid. Outside those niche communities, there is a lot less user generated trends and memes.
Anybody remember the button or the giant canvas? Haven't seen anything like that since the purge.
Thats not true. There was. Go take a look at the usership numbers.
HOWEVER, lemmy admins, especially dot world, dot ml, were being shit at the time^1^ and poured icecold water on the whole thing. Instead of using the opportunity to build out and embrace lemmy, it pretty much sealed its fate as a "halfway project". Seriously, go look at the numbers. Lemmy had an opportunity to "be the thing" and it blew it, and it blew it because of cultural reasons. And lemmy has continue to blow it since in this same manner. Admins and mods, instance in-fighting and drama, defederation: all of them have combined to slow/ halt the growth of the project. And in network based systems like social networks, even tapping on the brakes slightly is a deathnell. I mean look at how people like @PugJesus@lemmy.world or @return2ozma@lemmy.world have been treated. The decline in usership is a direct consequence of Admins and Mods expecting to be able to use their roles for the implicit projection of their political identities and how they think people should be using social media. And it killed lemmy.
There is a secondary and also very important issue which could (have) resolved this, in that Lemmy has some serious design flaws. And the number one/ two being (it could be considered one issue) is not having the ability to migrate a profile, or a sub to another instance; alternatively, we need a way to merge/ branch/ fork/ whatever/ communities. I think Mbin was an effort to hopefully address this, but it too now lays dead.
The problem can be described as follows, and during the reddexodous, the problem came up consistently. A curious user from reddit comes to explore Lemmy after getting burned by Reddit. Maybe they really like motocross racing. So they go to look for similar communities here on lemmy and find... nothing. There is no motocross community. There might be a dirt-biking community or a motor cycle community, but its far too small to support a tiny com. And so maybe the user makes a com for this. But its just them posting, they try for a while, they burn out. Its unsustainable.
The problem here is that networked systems, and social network systems in particular, need a critical mass to be able to function as a community. Small communities end up as vestigial dead end. Likewise, each lemmy instance is built to act like an entire reddit replacement. They're built to effectively be an "entire reddit" also federated with "other reddits". So instead of one c/politics, we end up with hundreds spread out across many instances. Mods and Admins implicity use their power to filter down the modes of discourse they find acceptable. Battles are waged, people who contribute substantially burn out. The top 1% of people actually contributing (re, not typically mods/ admins) get shit on for doing the work of keeping a community alive. All of this contributes to the issue of a lack of critical mass. So it can't be said its all social. Some of it is design. But its mostly a social issue and it comes from the petty authoritarianism of moderation (mostly).
A potentially better option would be to implement a git style "fork/ pull/ branch" system for communities, potentially also with the ability to "tag" content or posts. So you have one big "news" community. And posts get tagged for the different types of news (sports, weather, political) and when there is sufficient critical mass, you could "fork" that community. However, lets say you only forked for motocross tagged sports news, and its not sufficient to have a community around, that com could get pulled back into "motor sports" and even maybe into "sports" if there isn't sufficient activity. Likewise, an instance could "clone" a com when an over zealous admin or mod goes rogue. Take the @PugJesus@lemmy.world issue. They just didn't have it in them to build up a com for like, a fourth time, after getting shit on time and again.
I genuinely think the design limitations could be addressed.
And I think the social limitations could be addressed as well. I think a system of voting based on Karma based contributions to a community, especially around rules and moderation, could very much soften/ fix many of the non-admin related social issues. Being a moderator should be considered a privilege and a duty, because it comes with the ability to very much "steer" a community. c/Politics is a great example of how poorly this can doing and how wrongly it can be done, from the 2023-2025 time period. Honestly this one moderation team is probably responsible for more destruction of the ability to grow lemmy than any other, and its principally because they engage in a kind of implicit, technocratic approach to an agenda based moderation. And users like @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world , they werent even wearing a mask about the matter. They were explicitly moderating many of the largest coms specifically for forward their own zionist perspective and agenda. And this was allowed to continue for years and did real and everlasting damage to the communities here, scars and faultlines still persisting to this day.
But that social issue is one we could deal with technically. We should introduce democracy to lemmy and the fediverse more generally. We should be able to vote about who moderates the communities we participate in and contribute to. We should be able to vote on what the rules are and how they are implemented. And those votes should be weighted by those who contribute substantially to those communities. Its utterly doable. Its something we could fix.
1: And some say, remain so to this very day.___
I think this is gold, nail on head. So many of the problems in these social environments boil down to bad moderation. The current system of dictatorship of the first is pretty damn awful, right up there with some bird in a lake handing off a sword. The technology allows for the exploration of many other forms of rulership. While we could use a representative democracy system electing dictators, I suggest a step further to direct democracy.
Think of community rules as a constitution, voted on and then those rules enforced by the community in general. Even just replying to a suss comment that it breaks rule X and counting up/down votes and removing the comment at a certain threshold. Takes mod burnout out of the equation for a start. Perhaps vulnerable to brigading, but so is the current system. Perhaps there is a system of rules that could mitigate that, needs thought.
I'm not sure about weighted votes, lurkers are community members too, generally the vast majority. Put the mechanisms in place to try both weighted and equal votes (and perhaps membership age gating or other systems), give people the choice and see which creates better results.
Portability of users across instances is another sore point, as you say, and tagging could be a great enhancement, but I would argue those lesser than tyranny of the first moderation.
If you chose to polish this up (and perhaps split it into multiple) and post it somewhere, please let me know. It bears thought and development.
Thanks, its a critique I've been building on since 2023. Because I watched the consequences of these issues manifest in real time. And I think the same critique we would all rightfully bring to Reddit re-emerged here in lemmy, which is that this space, in-fact, all online spaces: they are something we all co-create; they are not a thing which is owned by one party, be it a company, an instnace owner, an admin, a mod, a poster, or a commenter.
The only right answer to me is also the spiritual fulfillment of the original reddit, of Lemmy and the fediverse more broadly, their deepest goal: to resinstill a sense of ownership of the communities we build together online. Reddit didn't make reddit. We made reddit and it was stolen from us. But then we just fell into the same traps as what happened to reddit. And the answer is as clear as it ever has been, although arguably, far closer to being reached.
I've done some ideating of how this might work, and I've been thinking that a "more general" approach which could be adopted across the fedivserse for democratizing actions would be better. But it would be easier to fork lemmy and just do it there. I also met someone a while back who had implemented some different voting tools in a federated fashion (I think for polls though). It would require some thinking and design and some testing. But it would be a helluva experiment.
I think the main problems with any new social media is the lack of users at the start. You offer the best features but it's still garbage if you don't already have a lot of users. As you said, Lemmy could add a lot of features that would help massively and that's the main advantage, Lemmy is open-source and decentralized and is much easier to make those changes possible without any "leader" approval.
It looks like reddit users don't have a saying and are not willing to force the CEO to implement some much needed changes and if the CEO decides one day to change something, well then to bad, you gotta get used to it because there's nothing you can do about it. The CEO and everyone that works at reddit cares about the shareholders and not the actual users.
Lemmy is not perfect but I think it's way better then reddit and has a bigger potential. Maybe one day Lemmy will be bigger then reddit or twitter. Getting the users is the hardest part.
There's quite a few of us. I see it referenced often.
Problem is reddit has the mass appeal that is missing here.
There are a dozen of useful/interesting things posted here while reddit has many times that.
Plus look at any game or other niche and you'll find much more activity for it on reddit than here.
I stopped using reddit when moving here and use it a ton less after 3rd party apps stopped working (and now mobile experience is horrific with their forcing their app)
But many search results still bring you there and for any discussions about products leads there too. Lemmy is still pretty lacking in many areas unfortunately
But you know what we do have?
Freedom. Fuck spez.
True. Fuck Spez and everyone who supported him.
Showing up on search results is the main advantage it has for drawing in new users. If the fediverse could show up higher in search results it'd get much more traffic.
The best thing anyone can do to fix that is comment and post.
Comments are in greater demand than posts because they drive further engagement and give posters more reason to post.
If you see a post with 0 comments, go comment on it and help the Threadiverse.
I am one in that first group. ~12 years being very active, thousands of comments and several active communities. Then I quit, fully cold turkey, and have never gone back.